Robert Dessaix - What Days Are For

One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses on a Darlinghurst pavement, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkins poem Days. What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved and why? This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality.

His face beams down at me like Gods from a dome of bright light. Everything gleams. Every blond hair on his tanned forearm glistens as he fits my mask. Its a glossy, muscled forearm, used to hefting bodies. Ive always been very taken with forearms, and this is a singularly lustrous, sinewy example. So, tell me, Robert, he says gently, somewhere high up there inside his dome of dazzling light am I already dead? No, not yet, soon have you had a good day?

A good day? I give a muffled laugh, batting away the pain blossoming in my chest. ( Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Tom Lehrer, wasnt it?) Theyre losing me, these two paramedics in their fluorescent jackets, and they know it even I know Im teetering on the edge of a big moment and all the one with the burnished forearm can come up with is Have you had a good day? Its surreal. The doors of the hotel foyer hiss open and a man, a woman and two teenaged children burst in out of the cold, squawking with late-night excitement, catch sight of the trolley, the body and the yellow jackets and hurry off towards the lifts.

You know, I croak, as if it were a serious question, as if he really wanted to know, I have. Ive had a very good day. And I have. Ive walked the dog by the river, I remember, Ive reread my play script aloud to myself in the sun, flown off with it at dusk across the sea to Sydney, mooched about (Id have liked to frisk) in the gritty trashiness of Oxford Street (still rumbling and screeching out there beyond the plate-glass windows) oh, and other things as well, Ive enjoyed lots of other things, now I cast my mind back. Would he want to know the details?

Well, thats wonderful, he says, still gleaming, thats what matters. Really? This sounds unlikely. But before I can pick an argument with him, they are trundling me out into the night, I am spasming with cold, a siren is screaming, I glide through doors, theres a lot of shouting, I slew left, I slew right, there are dozens of jarring voices, I feel clawed at by all the voices, but for some reason (and I know its strange even as its happening) they are all like noises-off. My mind is focused on the gleaming forearm and the voice from up inside the dome of light: Have you had a good day?

Nobody, by the way, during this not so much interminable as boundless night asks if Ive had a good weekend, let alone a good life. None of the voices jabbing at me ever asks what I think Ive achieved in the course of my life or if I feel its all been worthwhile (on the whole, all things considered). Nor do I ask myself these questions. Nobody cares at a time like this why would anybody care? about what Id like to achieve if they can keep me going for a bit longer. Not a syllable, naturally, about whether or not I finally got to the bottom of things before the curtain started to come down, as I rather hoped to do indeed, half-expected to do; surely it was just a matter of a week or two of the right kind of fallow time but never did. (On the contrary, the older I get, the less sense anything makes.) Needless to say, nobody checks to see if I finally finished the Proust, as I vowed I would before I died, or learnt Sanskrit or the tango or made it to Bhutan. The only question anyone asks me is whether or not Ive had a good day.

Well, on reflection, thats not quite true: coming to on this gurney or that, during this night that now seems beyond all thought of a beginning or an ending, I find myself being asked a few questions about who I am, whether or not I have private insurance and if there is somebody they should get in touch with. Imagine if at my age, after a lifetime of intimacies, there were absolutely no one! What would that say about me?

Yes, there is, I mumble, but tonight hes on a ferry in the middle of Bass Strait. At some point I seem to remember signing something: in the eerie, arctic cold of some brightly lit white room (its like being on a film set) I stretch out my hand and sign a form.

When more lucidly present, I become surprisingly talkative, sliding into my gracious-guest role, even offering a little light conversation. So, how are we going here? I ask affably at one juncture, unaware Ive already had to be resuscitated twice and am now bleeding to death. So much brilliant light everywhere. So many voices. But no faces, I cant see any faces. A little way to go yet, someone says with a chuckle. Nicely put. Could mean anything, and does.

What I am mostly doing is drowning in vibrantly coloured dreams. I am pixilating woozily. Despite the shock and pain, I am in quite a good mood. And every now and again my jangled mind flies back to that sleek and shiny forearm and the voice from far above me: Have you had a good day? For some reason this utterly banal line has wormed its way into my quick (or what is left of it). As I am wheeled into a vast, whirring machine whir, CLANK, Hold still!, CLANK, wheeze it strikes me that I but no, I cant hold the thought thrum, buzz, CLANK it strikes me that What? Im in a lift now, Im whooshing up into the sky. I zoom past a twisted Jesus nailed to the wall, looking pretty much the way I feel. I come to rest. Soft voices fade into the distance. A rubbery silence cocoons me. At last Im alone in the dark.

This sudden hush, this enveloping dark, is doubly eerie because just two days ago, feeling I should finish it before leaving for Sydney, I hurried to write the final lines of a talk I am to give in Canberra not next week or even next month, but in the spring. Yet I felt impelled to finish it two days ago. And I decided to call it Pushing Against the Dark. Its about lighting a flare, when I write in order (I think this is what I said) to bring hidden things out into the light (hidden selves, for instance, my raw or quirky sides, the facets I know some will mock, the unhealed wounds). By the end of the talk its clear that Im really pushing against a much more all-enveloping dark: I write to stave off time, to stave off nothingness. Its as if deep down some part of me knew But no, thats daft, thats superstitious non sense.

But why was I doing that? Who cared about my hidden selves? To be honest, I was actually casting another kind of light. Through language, the only torch I have. In E.M. Forsters phrase about Virginia Woolfs language, I was pushing against the dark not just the dark that certain hidden selves were crouched in, but a more powerful dark, the dark that, as we grow older, we all feel stealing over us, blotting out inch by inch what we have loved and who we have been the dark my gleaming spirals circle around, the emptiness I swirl around, spinning tales. The act of writing is an act of resistance against the mortal condition not mortality, but the mortal condition in the sense of deepening and magnifying the lived moment while writing. Every syllable I coax from my mind is a push against the dark, a small beam of light that dares the dark to snuff it out. I write to stave off time, to stave off nothingness Pushing Against the Dark